Captains log: Fish that fly

Date: July 18, 2022

Time: 18:40

Position: 24.1.993N / 144.11.571W

Yesterday was an amazing day with good wind from the morning until about 3AM. We plowed our way across the ocean, prying apart the blue gel ocean with the white wedge of our bow. There's a roar against the hull and the occasional pounding of a wave. You can somehow how envision the water streaming across every inch of the hull because it sounds you're under water. Then there are the sounds of all the fluids in our tanks sloshing around. Water tanks, fuel tanks, storage boxes with food, dishes slamming from side to side, and the creaking. As the boat heals you can hear the popping and pulling. Thick lines run through blocks on the deck with thousands of pounds of strain. Each undulation of a wave passing under brings with it sharp crackles from the lines tugging ever harder on every joint. 

And then theres the calm. The calm is the worst part. When the wind stops it almost feels like pain down to every bone. Some kind of torture. When the wind stops the waves don't stop, so the boat continues to bob and hurl but without direction. The lurching is exacerbated when the wind stops because we have no momentum to carry us through the difficult seas. Kind of like life, momentum is good.

We're really starting to notice the time change. 06:00 is completely dark now and it's not light until nearly 08:00. Hawaii is 3hrs behind so we're talking about changing our clocks tomorrow by 2 hours to at least get a little more adjusted to Hawaii. 

Wind blew wonderfully yesterday. All the way until about 03:30 this morning when once again the flopping began. Low winds this morning but finally picked up after noon and has been blowing ever since. I was writing this blog post a couple of hours ago when I was suddenly alerted to a squall approaching. It's really the first one now that we're here in the tropics or at least close to them. Things can be fine then all of a sudden you see off in the distance a very dark cloud going all the way to the water. It means a lot of rain, and with this rain comes a lot of water and wind. We're being extremely careful and conservative so we reefed our sails before the squall and it was just in time. It suddenly hit us with rain and about 25knts of wind. I was up on deck handling the reefing, Nick on the helm, Gene and Joe in the cockpit handling lines. It was our smoothest, quickest reef yet. The squall turned out to be small but it was great practice. There's a daily report from the other racers and there are numerous reports of squalls all day and night once you're about 3 days to Hawaii. Reports of big seas and high winds as well. I would normally be concerned of such reports, but this team is ready for wind and more action to carry us our final distance to the Islands. 

I came back down to write about the squall above, then we got hit by another one, a much bigger one. We all threw on our foul weather gear, quickly reefed the sails, then took off surfing up and down some nice waves in maybe 25-30knt winds. We were in it for about 2 miles, a little ride before it calmed down again. The stars tonight are unreal. The whole sky is lit up and it seems there's another star in every dark spot you look. 

Today we saw flying fish everywhere. Jump and out skimming the water for probably thousands of feet. We caught three more Mahi mahi. Gene cooked an other incredible lunch and we all got our fill. Still hoping for a small tuna!